It's a new and strange moment, captured in the photo that heads the article: a robot has just plucked the petals of an artifical daisy, with an eye to someday replacing the intricate but backbreaking human labor of tasks such as fruit-picking. "This is not something I've ever seen a robot do," says Professor Stefanie Tellex of Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS).

Sheelah Kolhatkar of The New Yorker paid a recent visit to Stefanie and her Humans to Robots Laboratory, and shares her findings in a long-form piece ("Welcoming Our New Robotic Overlords") that takes both a broad and deep look at automation, job loss, guaranteed minimum income, and other consequences of rapid advancements in robotics.

“What is something that people do now that robots might do?” asks Tellex in remarks that focus as much on income inequality as robotic grasping. “I usually like to ask the question: How can this help make society better?”